Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Could Reap $1 Million For Sun.com Domain
joabj writes "Last week, Oracle announced that it is decommissioning the Sun.com site, which it acquired as part of the $7 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems. So what will Oracle do with the domain name, which is the 12th oldest .com site on the Internet? Domain brokers speculate Oracle could sell it for $1 million or more, if it chose to do so."
Dr. Evil: Here's the plan. We get the warhead, and we hold the world ransomed for.....One MILLION DOLLARS!!
No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over nine billion dollars a year!
Dr. Evil: Really?
No.2: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Evil: That's a number. Okay then. We hold the world ransom for.....One hundred..BILLION DOLLARS!!
I just don't see them selling it off right now. It isn't like Larry is broke and needs the bucks. And it isn't like the market for domain names is at a high point. He would get more selling the Sun name, domain, and some minor IP to someone as a set. He has already carved all the white meat off that turkey, which is the customer base and some software.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Eh. They should probably sell it to the owners of the Phoenix Suns NBA team. They'll just redirect it to their official website.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
I mean buying domain names for much more than what they are worth worth? I havent visited sun.com in like ever.. nor will i ever
Oracle.xxx would actually make a lot of sense. Considering that their prices and policies are so obscene.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
What's the IP Address of the Sun?
Is there a financial instrument out there that will let me short-sell whatever moron thinks sun.com is worth more than pocket change? It's like dec.com, a historical footnote. Larry should just give it to a computer history society/museum for caretaking.
I remember working in the IT department of a fair-sized company back in '99 and it was a dedicated Sun shop, in fact my boss denigrated Linux and open-source software (of course he called it freeware) any chance he could. He talked like Sun would be around forever...oops.
So if they sold the domain but kept the rights to the Sun name as a trademark, then how could anyone open up a new Sun.com without being in danger of violating Oracle's trademark? People have been sued over their domains named after themselves when it has the same name as a trademark, even when their domain has nothing to do with whatever area the trademark is in.
If the company operates in an entirely different area from Sun Microsystems, such that no confusion could arise, or if Oracle abandons the Sun trademark, which they probably would be if they sold Sun.com, then there's no problem.
WRT lawsuits, the CIA has also been sued for mind control. You can sue for anything; winning is the hard part.
Indeed. I can't remember how many roomfuls of students I told to go to "java.sun.com" for all things Java.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Interesting that Microsoft, established in 1975, doesn't appear on the list of the 100 oldest dotcom registrations. Xerox registered before IBM. Boeing before Adobe. And Microsoft isn't on the list. Did they not recognise the long-term importance of the internet?
There's a limit to how much material you can admit to being obscene before the tabloids get interested.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Duh! That's how Oracle intends to make the really big bucks.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That was a typo. Oracle has already raped well over $10 Billion.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
$1M. Wow. Imagine what Oracle could do if they had $1M dollars.
I can't imagine Oracle will sell the domain. If they did tho, the buyer would have to get some sort of understanding about uses that didn't constitute trademark infringement... So I can't see Oracle letting it go without the surviving bits and chunks of Sun attached. Not like they're hard up for cash.
semi o/t, but this site might interest you
The gent has the same last name as a big car company. Sort of bad luck for him. He still has his domain, but out of pocket for lawyers...
There is probably tons of software that points at sun.com, automatically downloading software...
Oh God, it's like a black hat's wet dream. Thousands of machines requesting binaries from your server every second and then blinding running them.
On a more seriously note, sun.com is already gone, but my Java updates are still working fine, so I'd assume their update server isn't located at sun.com. Not to mention Java updates are probably cryptographically signed.
As the TLDs expand, the value of a ".com", even a sexy three letter one with some history decreases.
Ask instead which (pre CIDR) address block(s) Sun had and Larry E now has. IIRC, they're sitting on at least one "A" and potentially multiple "B"s.
Since "IPv4" is gonna implode this year (yeah, right, but just go with it.....), the IP space is gonna have much more real value.
Red
Bill Gates's book "The Road Ahead", is, in its first 1995 edition, focused on how the CD-ROM was going to change everything about computers. Remember Encarta? They were really focused on that -- multimedia on discs, that was going to be the future.
But then, for the 1996 printing, the whole thing was re-written and suddenly CD-ROMs weren't the hot thing. It was all about the Internet.
There is probably tons of software that points at sun.com, automatically downloading software, docs, etc.
There's lot of other stuff, too.
Like @sun.com mail addresses, just for starters.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I am sure, they keep it as a redirect. for sure in-links are mentioned in old documentation, for which customers may hold the new owner responsible (in the sense of the next buying decision). It makes a very bad impression if you follow a support instruction and end up on a webpage which does not exist (or worse: was sold and re-sold to a porn company).
What good is that? Every link to sun.com is broken. For example, every link to documentation on docs.sun.com? Yeah, those now just point you to a useless main documentation page for Oracle at Oracle.com (pissed off Sun employee who had years worth of links here that are all useless now and make doing her job more difficult).
Yeah, but being sued is both time consuming and expensive.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Come on guys, how many of you PEE IN THE SINK in the morning?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You do know "the sun king" has been dead for almost 300 years, right? And France hasn't had a king at all for more than 150 years...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
They already own the 3rd oldest .com domain so owning the 12th oldest likely doesn't mean much to them. Maybe collecting old domain names is what you do when you run out of other stuff to buy..
If the domain changes hands, that's going to break a lot of XML files containing xsi:schemaLocation attributes and DTD references pointing to documents within http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/ .
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
Having a domain like SUN.com! Just think of the internet street cred!
Yo dog! I'm at owner@sun.com!
And what would you do with sun.com? Start some sort of internet busin&@!%&*#%OHFUCK I already have a cease and desist letter from Oracle saying they still own the trademark 'Sun' in relation to all computer everything. Your best bet it so open Sun Bakery and sell cook#@&$*!DAMNIT! Cookies are computer related too.
Ok--here's the plan: Step 1: Buy sun.com for millions Step 2: Find out you can't start a computer company named 'Sun' or Oracle will sue you into oblivion. Step 3: Kill yourself because you are millions in debt with a worthless domain name.
There's no place like
Suns already have suns.com. Sun.com doesn't make any sense. Look at laker.com, celtic.com, etc. NBA teams don't own those.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Would you mind telling us what you're replacing it with? RHEL, Ubuntu Server, *BSD, other?
And how have you replicated those nice Solaris features (containers, that debugging thing, the new copy-on-write filesystem), or if they are missed at all?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
They should post that image from the old Goatse.cx site. That would be sweet. Well, perhaps horrifying but slashdotters could start linking to it again in 30% of the posts, just like in the old days....
Hey, you think your house is cool?
They have other options... they could parcel it out.... e.g. " for the low low price of $1000/CPU/year you too can have a prestigious @sun.com e-mail address "
And France hasn't had a king at all for more than 150 years...
Are saying the Burger King isn't a real king?
Royal with Cheese baby!
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
to buy son.com . It hosts some kind of search engine. Looks like it's been parked.
That could be a shrewd business move. Judging by the comments on this site, there's a huge market for people wanting to see Larry Ellison go fuck himself...put it on oracle.xxx and charge people $50 to see it and they could make millions.
Since there are probably still a multitude of links pointing to sun.com and people who follow those links are existing or potential Sun customers why would Oracle sell the domain and in effect turn away those customers?
I assume the domain name is useless as long as Oracle owns the trademark to "Sun".
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There are a number of things which tie into the sun.com domain; XVM Ops Centre downloads patches & so on from that site, SFT (Sun File Transfer) uploads Explorers to supportfiles.sun.com; until they get all their customers to stop using those URLs, they can't switch it off. I'm sure there must be a few other things using sun.com as well.
By selling their domain they would be effectively destroying the brand and that would be utterly foolish. It would destroy much more capital than the million it's allegedly worth.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Reason: redirects.
Thread over, move along.
PS: And they don't need the money, want to keep the namespace of Java functions etc etc etc etc etc. Why did this make frontpage?
Take a scale.
On one side of the scale, place a million dollars (relative to the annual revenue of Oracle).
On the other side of the scale, place the value of maintaining some kind of redirect for the millions of links that will never completely go away. Then place the value of keeping the domain out of the hands of anyone who might use it in a way detrimental to your interests. Last but not least... place the fact that "sun.com" is embedded in the DTD's and XML Schemas for virtually all Java technology, and it would take decades to fully migrate away from and decommission all that.
This is so stupidly lopsided, the scale would break. Oracle will never do this. Maybe the point is simply that this domain name has a high appraisal value... but even that is not particularly interesting (*every* three-letter domain has a high appraisal value). This "story" is only here because any lazy filler involving Oracle, Microsoft, or the other standard villains is always good for a few clicks and advertising impressions.
They may be decommissioning it, but that doesn't mean they're going to sell it. There are plenty of domains held by companies which they just hold for the purpose of making sure they have the domains matching their trademarks.
I'm not sure what the point in decommissioning it is, tbh. They may as well just make it point to the root Oracle homepage and forget about it.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
It would be a good domain for a company or advocacy group doing anything related to solar power to own...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There's no Burger King in France since 1997.
King of France? Rupert Murdoch and his "the Sun" newspaper empire might likely be interested..
I'm wondering, are all the people ruining the jokes in this thread French?
I'm wondering, are all the people ruining the jokes in this thread French?
Oui
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Probably not ; they're probably people from a culture that is generally proud of not needing to travel to meet foreign influences in different parts of the world (at least, not until they've been sanitised down to their own domestic standards).
Possibly they're even people who have, in living memory, had a head of state who has never felt the need to get a passport to travel the world on his own behalf.
Some such people seem to have been attempting to make jokes at the expense of the French, and falling flat on their faces by not having done their homework first.
(FWIW, I thought "sun.com" had a reasonable likelihood of ending up at Sun Oil. But then I thought "if they still exist?" It seems that they do, but only in a downstream capacity. Which is a shame ; they had some interesting projects before they left the table.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
http://blogs.sun.com/OTNGarage/entry/sun_com_will_disappear_after "A few days ago I wrote: The www.sun.com site will be decommissioned on June 1 of this year. In the comments I went on to say that I doubted there would be 1:1 redirects. I was wrong. (Don't tell my wife I'm capable of saying that!) The www.sun.com domain will NOT be decommissioned or sold on June 1 of this year. Rather, sun.com URLs will redirect to oracle.com URLs, with 1:1 redirects where possible. Most of the content that was on BigAdmin, OpenSolaris.com, and some sections of SDN has already been migrated to the System Admin and Developer Community of the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Our engineering team is working on a solution for the Hardware Compatibility List. I'll let you know where it ends up and in what form as soon as I know. If you find content on those legacy sites that you'd like to ensure we make available on OTN, please let me know. - Rick"